Facets Management Best Practices in SuiteCommerce

Facets are crucial components in search interfaces, providing users with filtering options to refine their product searches. However, overusing facets can lead to performance degradation, making it imperative to apply best practices in their management to deliver an optimal customer experience.

What are Facets and Why Do They Matter?

Facets serve as filters that allow shoppers to narrow down large sets of search results based on specific attributes. The right use of facets not only enhances user satisfaction but can also lead to higher conversion rates as customers can easily find what they are looking for. However, caution is needed:

• Is the filter useful? Ensure that the facet will genuinely benefit customers.
• How many values will it return? A facet yielding too many unique options may confuse users.
• What is the item return count for each facet? High numbers could overwhelm shoppers.

Best Practices for Managing Facets

Implementing facets strategically will prevent overwhelming users and ensure system performance. Consider the following recommendations:

• Limit the number of facets: Aim for no more than 40 facets in your configuration to mitigate performance issues.
• Cap facet values: Each facet should ideally have no more than 1,000 values to maintain clarity.
• Character limitations: Keep each facet value's name under 200 characters for simplicity.
• Necessity of each facet: Only add facets when they provide significant value to the filtering process.
• Field sets: Do not exceed 1200 total fields across Field Sets, Facet Fields, and Sort Fields to avoid search index rebuild failures.

Preventing Facets from Rendering in Search Results

To maintain a clean user interface, you may wish to prevent specific facets from appearing in search results. This can be achieved by configuring the facets_facet_browse.tpl template. By adding a data-exclude-facets attribute, you can specify which facets should be omitted:

<div data-view="Facets.FacetedNavigation" data-exclude-facets="commercecategoryname,category,myfacet,myotherfacet"><div>

For those using SuiteCommerce or SuiteCommerce Advanced 2021.2 and later, the defineSearchMasterOptions() method within the Environment component allows for site-wide default settings regarding the visibility of facets in the Item Search API, enabling further customization of how facets appear to users.

Conclusion

Effectively managing facets is essential for optimizing the search experience and maintaining system performance in SuiteCommerce. Applying these best practices will help achieve a seamless and efficient filtering process while enhancing shopper satisfaction.

Source: This article is based on Oracle's official NetSuite documentation.